Thursday, March 24, 2011

So the last time I released anything was back towards the end of the December. Probably the last time I coded anything Wii related was about the middle of January. So it begs the question: Where have I been? And where am I going?

I actually never left. My blog and my repos have run a bit dry of updates but I've been on IRC the whole time and I've still been answering all of my e-mails and I've even checked into the forums once or twice when both of those fronts slowed down. I've just been too busy to do anything interesting enough worth noting here. So I'm sure the few of you that remain (the daily number of hits on my blog as lowered from almost 2,000 to less than 300 since December) deserve to know so I'll tell you.

The first semester was a joke for me so I really went out of my to do everything I could to get more out of my time here for the second semester. I'm working three jobs so I can pay for college now without taking out a loan. One of them is hourly computer lab proctoring for my campus, another system administration over the entire network for my campus, and the third is commercial Android software development. Aside from this I've also put a couple freeware apps on the Android Marketplace I developed just for fun. In regards to my actual academia I convinced my computer science department to let me jump into their third and fourth year courses. I've been studying embedded hardware development with PIC Microcontrollers, x86 and MIPS assembly, Java, C#, lisp, computer architecture, and much more. I've filled many holes in my knowledge as a developer and I'm a lot better as a developer now than I was in August. Between what I take in school and what I'm doing for work this semester I can't even begin to express how much I've learned.

My semester ends in May and I'm going to be out of work when that happens. I'm currently looking at applying for Google's Summer of Code 2011. If any mentors are reading this and would be interested in having me work under them then please contact me ( email: castlevania7689@yahoo.com ). I would be willing to try anything.

Whether or not I do find a job this summer I am going to return to coding for Wii. scanff and I talked two days ago for the first time since October. We reevaluated the state of DeSmuME and a port we were doing together. We plan to finish our port and work on improving DeSmuME this summer. As for nulldce, it's in far better hands than mine now (including those of some popular Wii homebrew developers). I've left the project because it's evolving so rapidly that I can't keep up with it. I was about 60% done rewriting the syscheck implementation for DOP-Mii in January. Finishing that off as soon as possible will be one of my very first priorities. DOOM needs to be released. Sound support is in. The next build has one bug in loading save files as a result. I'm pretty sure I know what it is. This is another top priority for me. I plan to try hacking HHeretic and HHeXen so you can strafe and turn at the same time. The engine wasn't built to allow this but hard can it be? No guarantees on this one though other than that I will try. A few people have asked me to look at my Powder Toy ports and see if I can give them a better resolution for Wii. I plan to take a shot at it. And above all else, some way, some how, I am going to finally achieve Virtual Boy emulation on the Wii before the summer is over. I promised this almost a year ago and I intend to finally live up to it (ironically, it also took me almost exactly a year to get DeSmuME working). I'm considering hacking it out of (SDL based) Mednafen rather than finish my port of ALLEGRO and RealityBoy though (ALLEGRO is really, really, really difficult to finish) and the latest build of Mednafen is really, really, really nice.

I'm picking up a 3DS this Sunday. I really don't have time to play with it nor the hardware available to dump anything to reverse. But if anything happens with it I'll be sure to at least write something for fun for it. It looks like an awesome little system and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Also, you may not have noticed but I removed my donations awhile ago. This was prompted both by that I'm on a Wii hiatus and that I'm finally making enough money that not only can I afford school I have just enough extra too. So if I don't need it, why ask for it? If you've got the money, please donate to geohot or graf_chokolo who really do need it right now.

Things are going to continue to be quiet for a little while now. And I apologize in advance if this summer doesn't turn out to be quite as successful as I'm hoping it will be. But rest assured, whether it does or it doesn't, I'll still be here. I'll still live up to my plans one day. Thank you very, very much to everyone who has stuck with me for the three years I've been writing Wii homebrew software. And everyone who has stuck through my occasional idiocy and failed ambitions. This community made me who I am. I love this community and the work I have done for it. I will never abandon it.

Regarding your virtual boy emulator port: As you probably remember, I've been trying to make a VB emu port too. However after trying with Reality Boy for a bunch of weeks, I gave up. Some other weeks later, I decided to pick up again, this time trying Red Dragon (which is a modification of Reality Boy (you know that... but I state it anyway for the other readers of this)). However, this time I tried a simpler approach, using GRRLIB instead of GX (I know it will probably impact speed significantly, but I wanted to have something working instead of screwing up GX which I don't have much experience of and therefore is deemed to fail with). This, along with source code of a port of Red Dragon for the XBox made by a guy called darcelf (http://www.darcelf.tk/). However, after a while this port actually ran without hanging or crashing. This means, that I've possibly successfully ported the emulator core, however, when I tried to get something out of the framebuffer, I got only weird results (as usual, when I'mm doing semi-advanced graphics stuff). However, if you haven't completely abandoned the Reality Boy port yet, you might just check out darcelf's source code. He's good at explaining what he is doing. He also wrote a half done article about how he ported it that was really helpful for me. Unfortunately, it's a broken link now, but if you want it i *think* I have a copy of it somewhere on my other computer (I saved it to be able to work offline because of networking problems at my house.). No time to go search for it right now as I'm incredibly busy with school for a couple of more hours and as usual. However, if you want to give the thing I wrote a go, I'd be happy to send you my source code also (although, I'm not sure that it will help at all, but, as I mentioned earlier, I *think* I got the core running (but I've may as well have made changes to it that screw up the framebuffer in some way)). After all I'm not sure anything of this will help, but I just thought I'll let you know.

Contact me by mail, writing here, or any other way you might come up with! Glad to hear you're not dead! :D

yay updates! I'm glad to hear you have a game plan. You sound pretty busy, don't work yourself to death. Take your time, but to be honest I will be enjoying that DS emulator to the fullest when you finally release a playable version of it so use the knowledge that you'll be making this adoring fan a happy man to motivate you through your work!

I'm pretty sure Arikado doesn't know Spanish so here's a translation of the above comment (although it's not very proper..)>>Arikado, return to work on DeSmuME soon, you've done a great job so far everyone working on the project, I look forward to having better speed and now it is still slow, and now you're working on your studies, do you think you will return to work with DeSmuME soon? and I congratulate you for everything you have achieved so far as that is all thanks.